


Drown My Demons

by TheAuthorAgain



Series: Ongoing Fics [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Depressed Steve Rogers, Depression, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hurt Steve Rogers, Self-Harm, Song Lyrics, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Steve Rogers Has PTSD, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers-centric, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:08:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29768388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAuthorAgain/pseuds/TheAuthorAgain
Summary: Steve Rogers was broken, bleeding, and above all else, he was cold.
Relationships: Steve Rogers & Avengers Team, Steve Rogers & Original Male Character(s), Steve Rogers & The Futility of Existence
Series: Ongoing Fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2204046
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> If you did not read the tags, this story contains suicidal thoughts and actions, self harm, depression, disturbing war imagery, and PTSD. These things are not included with the intent of upsetting anyone, they are used tastefully to further the plot in a more complex way. Please reach out if you have a specific trigger that you want me to make sure is not in this story, something that I wouldn't know to include a warning for. Stay safe and enjoy Drown My Demons!

> 𝓟𝓵𝓪𝔂𝓵𝓲𝓼𝓽  
>  _Amen - Amber Run  
>  Creep - Radiohead  
>  Missing the War - Ben Folds Five  
>  I'm So Tired - The Beatles  
>  High Hopes - Kodaline  
>  Can You Feel My Heart - Bring Me the Horizon  
>  Listen Before I Go - Billie Eilish  
>  Firewood - Regina Spektor _

Ever since he got out of the ice, Steve had been cold. And not a cute, sweater coated and red nosed cold - an angry one, shuddering down to his bones and making the whole damn world seem like it was tinted in blue.

He tried everything. Heaters cranked all the way up, blanket after blanket wrapped around him until he was more fabric than man ... nothing worked. Nothing. And so Steve, adaptable as he was, just accepted that the numbing discomfort that accompanied his every day was just a new fact of this new life that made him want to tear out his eyes.

He remembered a lot of things from Before, things that he wished died with everyone he had ever loved. Babies crying, their mothers' emaciated corpses scattered across dusty roads like dolls left to wait for a child to play with them. Steve picked up a lot of those babies, dried what tears he could and handed them off to medics who weren't likely to survive another year. Steve wondered, sometimes, if those babies ever grew up. War was ugly, this one more than most, and childhood lost its meaning in the face of a Holocaust. For all Steve knew, the children he saved never made it to double digits.

And this was only one thing that preyed on his frigid mind. He thought of soldiers, too, young men with dreams and fears and strengths that meant nothing, _nothing,_ in the face of a German gun. Were their deaths for nothing? Were they born just to be remembered as one of countless victims?

This, Steve thought, was the true injustice of the war. He lived each day like it was going to be his last, knowing as well as anyone else that the breath in his lungs was not a right. He took care of the men around him, did everything he could to keep them safe and strong and, above all else, breathing. He believed, despite the insurmountable odds, that the guys who laughed with him, shared a table with him, would live to do the same with their families and lovers back home. He was wrong.

Steve Rogers had a chance not many did - a chance to see his life's work shattered in an instant. They won the war, people told him, proud and respectful and idiotic. They were fools, to think that any war waged has a chance at victory when it leaves such deep wounds in the souls of all involved.

He remembered their faces, clean shaven and bearded, smiling and empty, always so very young. Steve celebrated each face he recognized in this strange future, each face that had lived long enough to be carved with wrinkles and age spots. They were few and far between. Steve dragged himself to cemetery after cemetery, shivering all the way, just to look at the countless headstones of his failure. America and the world won the war. Steve Rogers and the corpses did not.

And yet, somehow, they thought him a hero. As if anyone can be considered a hero after being responsible for so many deaths and ruined lives. Steve was cold, painfully so, both in body and mind. Neither was quite ready to leave that frozen plane, that grave that he deserved after all his sins.

One thing that Steve liked about music in the future was its honesty. Brutal sometimes, crude at others, people never feared voicing the thoughts in their head. Steve thought this was beautiful.

Some lyrics hit him like a train, made him stop what he was doing and listen. He only played light stuff when other people were around, sappy love songs and upbeat tunes everyone tapped their feet to but Steve. But the sad songs, the dark ones, they serenaded him each night as he lay on his bed as stiff as his mothers corpse.

_"Sometimes I wish I were dead, least then I'm with you..."_

He'd reel, because that's how it felt. That's how it felt to grieve, to hurt, to feel like dying wouldn't change much in the world since he was already a dead man walking. A corpse fooling around in the shoes of a hero he could never be.

_"Time may fly, and dreams may die...the shaking voice that tells him, 'go,' still thinks he might. He knows he won't."_

Steve felt like he was clinging to life sometimes. And for what? What did he have that six million dead Jews didn't? How was he better than everyone who died before he was given a second chance? Death, it followed his every step and haunted his every thought. He was obsessed, really, couldn't stop thinking about the idea of everything just being done. Over. It seemed more and more appealing every day.

_"You know I'd give you everything I've got for a little piece of mind..."_

He was so cold, all the time. And it started out fine, really, until he remembered all the ways they used to keep warm Before. Huddling up together, being close to one another, sharing body heat. He remembered that, and realized that no one had hugged him in the three months since he had been woken up from the ice. It joined the collection of things tearing apart his mind, the collection of things he could do nothing about.

_"I don't care if it hurts, I wanna have control. I want a perfect body, I want a perfect soul..."_

He started getting a little more reckless after the Battle of New York. Clearly, he could survive just about anything. So what was wrong with jumping too soon, dodging too late? Steve didn't see the problem. In fact, the injuries that often followed felt right. Justified. Even though no matter how many times he punished himself, they were still dead and it was still his faut.

_"When it all comes to an end ... the world keeps spinning."_

Steve wasn't quite sure when it started twisting a little. When the logic went from "you're doing this for penance" to "you're doing this for pleasure". Because he enjoyed it, relishing the pain of a broken bone or a gunshot wound or a burn. He was so damn cold all the time, but pain felt like fire. Distracted him, healed him. Kept him going. He figured that everyone else must assume he was just off his game during fights.

_"I can't drown my demons, they know how to swim..."_

So maybe he started to go off the rails a little bit. Steve didn't regret it, though deep down he knew he should. Maybe he stopped eating so that his healing factor couldn't erase his wounds. Maybe he started gaining mysterious injuries outside of his missions.

Maybe he found himself with a gun in an abandoned parking ramp at 4:57 AM on July 27.

_"Call my friends and tell them that I love them and I'll miss them. But I'm not sorry..."_

He looked down the barrel of the gun and he thought, If Mama could see me now... but she couldn't. She never would. Because he was sitting on the concrete, and it was cold, but so was he so it didn't much matter. And he waited for something, someone, anything, anyone, but nothing and no one came.

_"Rise from your cold hospital bed, I tell you, you're not dying!"_

Steve Rogers was dying from the moment he was born, as all men are. Chance and raw will had kept him alive for this long, but both were running far too low in his heart to work much longer. So he looked idly over his pistol, checked to see that it was still loaded and functional. It was. He lifted it to his chin, and waited a little longer. The silence was deafening, suffocating, freezing cold. He shivered a bit, and with one action, the world was forever changed.


	2. II

Contrary to popular belief, Steve was not asleep inside his icy grave. He wasn't exactly awake, either, but...he wasn't asleep.

It was like he was floating, his consciousness drifting around through muddy recollections of the things he had seen. He dreamed of battlefields and Brooklyn, the faces fuzzy and the voices sounding like they came from a lifetime away. 

Sometimes, he was more asleep. His closed eyes gave him visions of never ending car rides or night watches, and he could just spend a few minutes (years) lying in peace.

Sometimes, he was more awake.

When he was awake, the dreams grew sharper. Colder. When he saw a battlefield, he felt the bullets pierce his body. His entire body constantly felt like it was on pins and needles, and he was so freezing cold that he thought death would be better than this stabbing discomfort.

Was he dead? Hard to tell.

He only truly woke up once. It was the most terrifying moment of Steve Rogers' life. He wasn't sure why, but a dream ended and he realized that he could not move. It was like sleep paralysis, but he couldn't open his eyes. Couldn't speak. Couldn't hear. Couldn't breathe.

In hindsight, Steve knew that it was only ten seconds or so before his body gathered its senses and pulled him back down into dreams. But it felt like centuries to him, a thousand lifetimes spent sharply aware of his frigid predicament he could do nothing about.

Waking up...

Waking up from the ice was easy. Steve just opened his eyes, after having been heavily sedated through the process of being thawed out. Sure, the psychological trauma that accompanied his seventy year nap was substancial, but the process of his awakening was practically painless.

The same could not be said for waking up from a gunshot wound to the head.

At first, Steve thought he had succeeded. God, he really did. The time between pulling the trigger and faintly hearing voices around him was large, a part of him knew this, but the voices were quiet enough that he could imagine they were angels. The bright light that he became more and more aware of just cemented this idea.

But then he began to hear what the angels were saying, and a sickening horror overtook him.

"...waves are stabilizing, I think that if we keep..."

"...serum? We might not even need to have another surgery if..."

"...know, Mr. Stark, but you have to be patient..."

"Steve? Can you hear me?"

Those weren't the gates of heaven he saw behind closed eyes, they were bright hospital lights shining down on him. Those weren't angels, they were doctors.

_Fuck._

Steve wished he could cry, lying prone on the bed. Because the irony was terrible: he had managed to get dozens of men killed without trying at all, but he couldn't end a single life when it was all he wanted to do.

Steve probably could've cried, if he chose to open his eyes. He could've. He didn't.

As the voices around him increased their clarity, Steve wished more and more that he had never been woken up from the ice.

"You're an asshole, you know that? An asshole. Just wake up so I can yell at you when your eyes are open, huh?"

"Why didn't you talk to me, Steve? You knew that I had gone through this, you knew...please, please wake up."

"Well, we're trying to keep the press off your back. Pepper's been a godsend, been keeping both the press and Tony in check. You made a big old mess, Rogers, you really did. Wish I could be mad at you."

"The others have stayed by your bedside, my friend, so I felt I must as well. A warrior such as yourself deserves a death far more honorable than one by his own hand, deserves a life far more glorious than one he wishes to end. Awaken, Captain, so that we may help you."

"Yeah, Pep's been great. Everyone has been, really. Y'know, this is the most united we've been since New York, which is kind of funny. Not that-you know what I mean. Just...fuck, Steve, I've been here. I know that if you can hear us, you just want us to go away so you can die in peace. But if you choose to wake up, Cap, I promise we'll help you out. Judgement free. You aren't weak, I promise. Just wake up."

Eventually, Steve listened.

He started by flexing a finger. Wiggling it around before moving to the next. His lungs came afterwards, with Steve forcing himself to gain control of the rising and falling of his chest. He worked his way slowly across his entire body, waging a war for command, until he was able to open his eyes.

He didn't like what he saw.

His waist was strapped down gently to the hospital bed, as were his hands and feet. There was an unarmed guard outside the clear door, and a large window to his left showed an observation room. A woman was on the phone, staring at him with wide eyes as her mouth moved rapidly.

As if on cue, a man in a white lab coat showed a badge to the guard outside the door before coming in, a large smile on his face, "Steve! I'm so happy to see you awake. How are you feeling, does anything hurt?"

Steve just stared for a moment. Yeah, everything hurt. And not just physically. The simple idiocy of the question left him baffled, but the presumed doctor took his silence in stride. "That's alright if you can't articulate what hurts right now, we'll try to adjust your med levels until you feel ready to talk. Do you remember anything from before you woke up?"

"The first time or now?" Steve's voice croaked out, grating from disuse. "I could tell you all about the war if you want, but I'm guessing that's not what you're asking." Although it hurt his throat, Steve felt a primal need to be snarky.

The doctor gave a wry smile in return. "You guess correctly. May I be blunt?" Steve nodded. "You shot yourself in the head, Steve." Although he knew that already, Steve couldn't help flinching at the words. "You don't have to talk about it right now if you don't want to, but you need to eventually. And while your friends have been told to avoid the topic of why you're in this bed, the Avengers are not known to follow orders and I doubt they'll shy away from a problem that's staring them right in the face."

Steve just stared for a moment as the man let his words sink in. Having it put in such plain, brutal terms...Steve felt shame and anger, guilt and fear. He appreciated that the doctor wasn't lying to him or trying to pretend that everything was peaches and cream, but he couldn't hold back the anger that bubbled up inside him. "What, so I'm a problem? If you wanted to fix me, maybe you shoulda just let me deal with it myself, instead of chaining me to a bed and watching me like I'm a goddamn zoo exhibit."

"The restraints are for your own safety. I know from personal experience how much they suck, but I promise that some day you will be grateful we forced you to live. You're not a problem, Steve, your depression and suicidal thoughts are. _Those_ are what we want to fix, not you."

Steve felt like he had been punched in the guts. "You've...you've, uh-"

"Yeah," the doctor said easily, "I have. And so I know that you hate my fucking guts right now, and you hate the world, and you hate yourself more than everything else combined. But I've had to force five superpowered individuals out of your hospital room every day for the past eight weeks because they cared about you too damn much to let you out of your sight, and you need to try and feel something other than hate for their sake. It's okay if you can't, but you gotta try."

After another long pause, Steve cleared his aching throat.

"Okay."

**Author's Note:**

> I may write more of this if people are interested, so comment your thoughts and how you would want it continued. Thanks for reading!


End file.
